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I love the book Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, about a group of musicians and Shakespearean actors travelling round a post-apocalyptic USA. One of my favourite parts is where two former business men (who were trapped, and now live in, an airport) discuss the corporate speak in an old document one of them has preserved in the airport’s ‘Museum of Civilisation’:

“Okay, so under ‘Communication’ here’s the first comment. ‘He’s not good at cascading information down to staff.’ Was he a whitewater rafter, Clark? I’m just curious.”

“This one’s my other favourite. ‘He’s successful in interfacing with clients we already have, but as for new clients, it’s low-hanging fruit. He takes a high-altitude view, but he doesn’t drill down to that level of granularity where we might actionize new opportunities.'”

“There are high altitudes, apparently, also low-hanging fruit, also grains of something, also drilling.”

“Presumbaly he was a miner who climbed mountains and actionized an orchard in his off-hours.”

This type of corporate speak is invading higher education. I’ve been in a meeting where someone said ‘yes, we can onboard that resource’, which took me a while to realise meant ‘hire a new person’ (I think!).

There’s been a huge rise in the number of professional staff working in universities (see Hannah Forsyth’s excellent book for the Australian context), many of whom have come from the corporate world. I realise that universities are increasingly run as large corporations – with salaries to match for those at the top. But the corporate-speak feels jarring to me, at odds with the intellectual endeavours of higher education.

“The new language is the offspring of a hypertrophic bureaucracy,” he said. “We know that the old academic language was muddy, pompous and rhetorical. For decades we fought against it and looked with longing towards the clarity and conciseness of the English language. But this is worse, often I have no idea what they are talking about. It is both glacial and mystifying.

“I believed our job was to form minds, awaken interests, stimulate intellectually and transmit knowledge. I now discover that I am providing a ‘service’, like gas, to ‘customers’ who, if all goes well, become ‘products’, like tinned food.”

Keir Thorpe suggests that the rise of corporate speak might be the fault of academics, some of whom look down on administrators.

Whatever the reason for the invasion, the language we use is important. What are your thoughts on this topic? Should we resist corporate speak, or is it here to stay?